This, the war-wound interpretation of the story was established not by textual evidence, but by what the critics knew about the author’s life — or rather what they thought they knew about his life. After he was dead, they eagerly seized on his posthumously published comment in A Moveable Feast that Big Two-Hearted River was about ‘coming back from the war, but there was no mention of the war in it as clinching proof that they were right. They would have been better advised to wonder if a master manipulator was not making fools of them from beyond the grave, as he so often had in life.Kenneth S. Lynn, in his biography Hemingway.
People always think that the reason [Hemingway is] easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t . . . The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using ‘and’ for padding.Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire Of The Vanities.
[Across The River And Into The Trees is] one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.J. Donald Adams, New York Times.
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, who life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
Rainer Maria Rilke.
American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?Gore Vidal.
AFTER the appearance of Death In the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing and Green Hills Of Africa Hemingway’s star was decidedly waning among the literati, but conversely his name was becoming ever better known among the public, and his fame was growing, not least through his own efforts. As John Raeburn details in Fame Became Him, Hemingway was adept at self-promotion, and he took a subtle but active part in raising his profile.
This practice, says Raeburn, had begun even when Hemingway was unpublished and an unknown working as Ford Madox Ford’s deputy on the transatlantic review [sic]. The articles he wrote for the magazine, says Raeburn, were
precisely because of his growing celebrity and public profile. Hemingway knew how much that was worth to Gingrich (right) and insisted on being well paid: he received twice as much for each Letter than any other contributor to the magazine, and his fee rose by the year. Furthermore, Hemingway was free to write on whatever subject he chose, though, as Raeburn observes,
trivial in terms of [his] literary career, but they are significant in terms of his career as public writer. They revealed that his public personality was incipient at the outset of his professional life, and that he was willing to use it for self-aggrandisement. They were a preview of the self-advertisements that would spread his fame in the next decade beyond the limited audience provided by an intellectual elite; and they foreshadowed that in his non-fiction his great subject was to be himself.The self-promotion was also the essence of the pieces — they were called ‘Letters’ — Hemingway was hired to write for the new and popular lifestyle magazine Esquire. It was launched in 1933 as an upmarket lifestyle guide for men, and Arnold Gingrich, a founder and its editor, was keen to sign up Hemingway
for the rest of his career [Hemingway] advertised his public personality in his considerable body of non-fiction, for whatever his nominal subject, he real subject was himself.Hemingway’s metamorphosis from ‘promising writer’ into ‘one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’ was thus continuous and steady. The irony was that it was no longer the literary world that was confirming his status, but the judgment of popular acclaim. In fact, in professional terms, except for his journalistic work for Esquire and other publications, a decade after he had burst onto the literary scene his future looked bleak.
Until 1940 when Hemingway published is bestselling For Whom The Bell Tolls, the comparative failures in the 1930s of his non-fiction and fiction dictated his literary standing. Although Max Perkins was pleased when in 1937 Hemingway published To Have And Have Not and it sold well, the critics regarded it as at best mediocre to not very good at all. In a review of For Whom The Bell Tolls in the literary quarterly Scrutiny, Wilfrid Mellers was not the only critic to wonder aloud what was going on. He even described To Have And Have Not as
Between August 1937 and May 1938 Hemingway visited Spain four times, both to help with filming a documentary about the country’s civil war (which became The Spanish Earth for which he wrote and spoke the commentary) and as a war correspondent, hired by the North American Newspaper Alliance. In keeping with his by now prominent public profile, his departure for Spain was ‘news’ and duly reported in the papers.
September 1, 1952, edition, and all five million copies of it sold out. As far as the public were concerned, if Ernest Hemingway was not ‘one of the country’s greatest living writers’, who was?
Yet despite publishing just those two books in his final 20 years, Hemingway had by no means been idle: when he returned from the war in Europe at the beginning of March 1945 until he died 16 years later, he stuck to his usual disciplined routine when he was not travelling or on a hunting trip of writing every morning, then taking the afternoon off.
In fact, Hemingway could not stop writing: each manuscript he produced had to be heavily edited, often substantially, to turn it into a publishable form. A Moveable Feast was the first of his works to appear after his death, in a version edited by his wife Mary Welsh from several extant drafts. Her edits were eventually challenged — she had, for example, arbitrarily deleted a section in which Hemingway publicly apologised to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, for treating her shabbily — and a new version, this time edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway, appeared in 2009, although it, too, sparked controversy.
Islands In The Stream came next, published in 1970 and, nine years after Hemingway’s death, it sold well, spending some time in the list of the top ten bestsellers. When he started writing it, it was to have been the ‘big book’ about the war everyone said they were excited about Hemingway writing. He had announced it would be about ‘war on the sea, in the air, and on land', but after a promising start, Hemingway lost track and the ‘big book’ he hoped to write came to nothing.
such a wickedly bad book that one began to despair of Mr Hemingway’s reputation. It was chaotic and it was insincerealthough he did concede that
chaos and insincerity are not faults typical of [Hemingway’s] work.
. . .
His celebrity was already such that in November 1937 the New York Times informed its readers that ‘Hemingway Writes Play In Shell-Rocked Madrid’. That play, The Fifth Column, features a very thinly disguised Hemingway as a cynical, hard-drinking and well-informed war correspondent and secret agent, 
and a very thinly disguised Martha Gellhorn (left) as the hero’s rather bubble-headed, Vassar-educated mistress, also a war correspondent. It takes place in the city’s Hotel Florida where the protagonists are holed up, as were Hemingway and Gellhorn.
Before it was staged, Scribner’s published it in a joint volume with a re-issue of Hemingway’s first 49 short stories. If finally had a 14-week run on Broadway two years later, directed by Lee Strasberg, but not until the producers had it re-written by Hollywood screenwriter Benjamin Glazer (who had co-scripted the film version of A Farewell To Arms starring Gary Cooper). The Fifth Column was not a success (and it has been revived just twice in the past 80 years, in New York in 2008 and in London in 2016). The critic Alfred Kazin declared in the New York Herald Tribune Books that it was
The novel he wanted to write was For Whom The Bell Tolls, and when it was published in 1940, it’s reception was spectacular, and it substantially revived Hemingway’s career among the critics. Almost all praised the novel as a return to form, though one or two thought the romance between Robert Jordan and Maria was artificial and superfluous.
hardly a great play [though] an interesting Hemingway period pieceadding
I almost said Hemingway short story, so nimbly do his stage people talk the clipped Hemingway speech — for it tells us more about him than it does about Spain.One setback for Hemingway while in Spain was a rebuke from the North American Newspaper Alliance who asked him to write more about the war and what was happening and less about himself and his experiences. At the end of May 1938 and realising that the Spanish Loyalists’ cause was lost, he returned to the US, telling the New York Times that he was a little jaded with active reporting on the war front and wanted to write some short stories and a novel, though, he added, he might return to Spain ‘if things get warm over there’.
. . .
One — notable — dissident from the overall critical acclaim was the Spanish writer and journalist Arturo Barea, and he was especially scathing. Barea had lived alongside Hemingway and Gellhorn at the Hotel Florida before the city was evacuated and he and the writer were well acquainted, not least because Barea had
run the Loyalist government censor’s office in Madrid which had to pass all correspondent’s copy before it could be dispatched. Reviewing For Whom The Bell Tolls for Horizon in May, 1941, he praised parts of it, but declared that
as a novel about Spaniards and their war it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful, though practically all the critics claim the contrary, whatever their objections to other aspects of the book.He added that a foreign reader would
come to understand some aspects of Spanish character and life, but [would] misunderstand more, and more important ones at that.Barea (right) also dismissed the three-day love affair between Jordan and Maria, remarking that a
Spanish girl of the rural middle class is steeped in a tradition in which influences from the Moorish harem and the Catholic convent mix [and] could not ask a stranger, a foreigner, to let her come into his bed the very first night after they had met . . .He declared that Hemingway’s depiction of the Jordan and Maria’s short liaison was ‘pure romancing’, a verdict that was echoed 20 years later by Maxwell Geismar in the New York Times who noted that For Whom The Bell Tolls
sometimes called Hemingway’s best novel . . . is a curious mixture of good and bad, of marvellous scenes and chapters which are balanced off by improbable or sentimental or melodramatic passages of adolescent fantasy development.Yet by late 1940 when For Whom The Bell Tolls was published, Hemingway need no longer care about the critics and their opinions: the public loved it, and its sales were astonishing. According to biographer Jeffery Meyers, For Whom The Bell Tolls sold half-a-million copies in the first six months, and its runaway success was boosted when it was chosen as a Book of the Month.
This was another irony: as an unknown ‘promising writer’ of the 1920s, Hemingway had proudly purported to care nothing for material success and claimed to despise writers whose work succeeded because it was chosen by the Book of the Month club. By 1940 he had overcome his distaste, and his change of heart ensured he was a wealthy man for the rest of his life.
More to the point his status with the public as ‘one of America’s greatest writers’ was well on its way to being assured. Yet as far as literary esteem was concerned, that was pretty much it for Hemingway: from 1940 until his suicide 21 years later in July 1961, he published just two more works of original fiction — the bestselling, but critically panned, Across The River And Into The Trees and his celebrated novella The Old Man And The Sea — and the reception of both highlighted the ever-widening divide between his literary reputation and his public standing.
Across The River And Into The Trees was published ten years after For Whom The Bell Tolls appeared. Hemingway wrote the novel after developing an amour fou for Adriana Ivancich (pictured), a 19-year-old Venetian woman he met on an extended trip to Europe in 1948/49 with his wife Mary. It is a distinctly
fantastical account of the last three days in the life of 50-year-old Colonel Richard Cantwell (quite obviously yet another Hemingway avatar) and his ‘affair’ with Renata, a 19-year-old Venetian woman.
. . .
Hemingway began writing it as a short story while still in Italy and developed it into a novel once he was back in Cuba (breaking off from work on the two novels he had begun in 1946 which eventually appeared, in one form or another after he had died as Islands In The Stream and The Garden Of Eden).
In Across The River And Into The Trees, Cantwell and Renata have sex several times in a gondola, provoking Italian critics — echoing Arturo Barea’s scathing comments about the ‘affair’ in For Whom The Bell Tolls — to declare that a ‘Venetian noblewoman’ would never be unchaperoned and would never have sex so casually. (Ivancich was chaperoned at every meeting she had with Hemingway and the mid-life passion he had for her was unrequited.)
The American critics, memorably described by Hemingway in Green Hills Of Africa as
Two years later Hemingway’s short novel — more a novella — The Old Man And The Sea was an even greater success. It, too, was chosen as a Book Of The Month, its initial 50,000 copy print-run sold out in days, and it rose to number seven in the bestsellers’ list. Life magazine printed the complete story in its
lice who crawl on literatureloathed it. In the New York Times J. Donald Adams confessed the novel was
one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.The novelist John Dos Passos, by now only nominally ‘a good friend’ after he and Hemingway had fallen out 12 years earlier in Spain wrote in a private letter
How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?In the Saturday Review Of Literature, Maxwell Geismar observed that Across The River And Into The Trees was
. . . an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway’s talent and achievement. It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws a doubtful light on the future. It is so dreadful, in fact, that it begins to have its own morbid fascination. . .In Nation, Morton Dauwen Zabel described it as
the poorest thing its author has ever done — poor with a feebleness of invention, a dullness of language, and a self-parodying of style and theme even beyond ‘The Fifth Column’ and ‘To Have and Have Not.’On the other hand the public loved it as much as they had loved For Whom The Bell Tolls: it, too, sold extremely well and spent seven weeks in the bestsellers’ listing, becoming the third bestselling novel of 1950. One America’s ‘greatest writers’? Who knows, but the public most certainly thought so even if the critics no longer did.
Two years later Hemingway’s short novel — more a novella — The Old Man And The Sea was an even greater success. It, too, was chosen as a Book Of The Month, its initial 50,000 copy print-run sold out in days, and it rose to number seven in the bestsellers’ list. Life magazine printed the complete story in its
September 1, 1952, edition, and all five million copies of it sold out. As far as the public were concerned, if Ernest Hemingway was not ‘one of the country’s greatest living writers’, who was?
Yet despite publishing just those two books in his final 20 years, Hemingway had by no means been idle: when he returned from the war in Europe at the beginning of March 1945 until he died 16 years later, he stuck to his usual disciplined routine when he was not travelling or on a hunting trip of writing every morning, then taking the afternoon off.
In those last 16 years, he wrote several hundred thousands of words: apart from the two works which were published while he was still alive, he produced substantial drafts for what became his novels Islands In The Stream and The Garden Of Eden, his memoir A Moveable Feast — though he asked his publisher to market is as ‘fiction’ — a second bullfighting book, The Dangerous Summer, and finally True At First Light, which like his memoir was something of a hybrid between fact and fiction. All were posthumously published.
In fact, Hemingway could not stop writing: each manuscript he produced had to be heavily edited, often substantially, to turn it into a publishable form. A Moveable Feast was the first of his works to appear after his death, in a version edited by his wife Mary Welsh from several extant drafts. Her edits were eventually challenged — she had, for example, arbitrarily deleted a section in which Hemingway publicly apologised to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, for treating her shabbily — and a new version, this time edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway, appeared in 2009, although it, too, sparked controversy.
Islands In The Stream came next, published in 1970 and, nine years after Hemingway’s death, it sold well, spending some time in the list of the top ten bestsellers. When he started writing it, it was to have been the ‘big book’ about the war everyone said they were excited about Hemingway writing. He had announced it would be about ‘war on the sea, in the air, and on land', but after a promising start, Hemingway lost track and the ‘big book’ he hoped to write came to nothing.
It’s genesis was also questionable: at first consisting of four sections and initially spoken of by Hemingway as his ‘war novel’, one section was hived off to become The Old Man And The Sea, and he struggled to complete the fourth section. He eventually assured his publisher, Scribner’s, that it had been completed but was being kept in a bank vault for the time being.
One suggestion has been that Hemingway regarded it as an insurance policy’ to be cashed in if he became too infirm or simply could not write any more. Another suggestion is that he wanted to avoid paying even more income tax for which he would have been liable had the book sold well.
A third suggestion has been that he suspected it wasn’t quite good enough in its current state. But all this is speculation. The fact is that it wasn’t published while he was alive, and it had to be cut and substantially edited before Scribner’s published it.
For the eventual publication in 1985 of The Garden Of Eden, Hemingway’s 200,000 word-long manuscript also had to be substantially cut, by a drastic two-thirds, and some critics questioned whether it bore any resemblance to the novel Hemingway might have completed. Whole plot lines and characters
were discarded in the editing, although Tom Jenks, a former Esquire and The Paris Review editor who was hired by Scribner’s to do the work after in-house editors gave up, claimed
The Dangerous Summer began as a 10,000-word feature Hemingway had been contracted to write by Life magazine about a series of competitive bullfights by Spain’s two leading matadors. After an extensive and exhausting tour of Spain’s bullrings to gather copy (at a time when Hemingway’s health was giving way), he pleaded that 10,000 were too restrictive for the piece he had in mind, and Life agreed he could write more.
For the eventual publication in 1985 of The Garden Of Eden, Hemingway’s 200,000 word-long manuscript also had to be substantially cut, by a drastic two-thirds, and some critics questioned whether it bore any resemblance to the novel Hemingway might have completed. Whole plot lines and characters
I did only what I thought Hemingway would have done.This tells us rather less than he or we might think: how was Jenks (left) or anyone else to know a quarter of a century later ‘what Hemingway would have done’ and what that was? This also raises the interesting ontological question of how much the published novel was indeed ‘Hemingway’s work’, a point Jenks was sensitive about.
The Dangerous Summer began as a 10,000-word feature Hemingway had been contracted to write by Life magazine about a series of competitive bullfights by Spain’s two leading matadors. After an extensive and exhausting tour of Spain’s bullrings to gather copy (at a time when Hemingway’s health was giving way), he pleaded that 10,000 were too restrictive for the piece he had in mind, and Life agreed he could write more.
As it grew ever longer, Hemingway decided it might become a coda to a re-issue of Death In The Afternoon. He eventually wrote 120,000 words, but this was far too much for what Life wanted, and his copy was eventually edited down by Life — with the help of A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway had tried to do so himself and failed — to a 30,000-word feature, which appeared in Life in instalments over three issues in September 1960. Twenty-five years later Hemingway’s 120,000-word manuscript was again re-edited, cut to 75,000 words and as The Dangerous Summer appeared in book form.
True At First Light, which was eventually published in 1999 — the occasion was nominally the centenary of Hemingway’s birth but one suspect Scribner’s were also keen to squeeze the last dollar out of their property — was an account of Hemingway’s second East African safari which had ended when he was involved in two plane crashes in as many days, the second of which almost cost him his life (right).
True At First Light, which was eventually published in 1999 — the occasion was nominally the centenary of Hemingway’s birth but one suspect Scribner’s were also keen to squeeze the last dollar out of their property — was an account of Hemingway’s second East African safari which had ended when he was involved in two plane crashes in as many days, the second of which almost cost him his life (right).
Although in the aftermath of the accidents he played to the gallery as the indestructible ‘Papa’ Hemingway who had yet again cheated death, his condition was poorly and his health declined inexorably until his suicide seven years later.
Still recovering from the severe injuries he sustained in the second plane crash, Hemingway began writing True At First Light in 1954, at first intending it to be a novel, but after completing more than 800 pages, he gave up and did not further work on itself and it was edited into shape by his second son, Patrick.
As Hemingway’s last work to be published, it was something of a sad adieu. Reviewers loyally and dutifully noted — after all by then Hemingway was a Nobel laureate and thus officially ‘one of the world’s greatest writers’ — that it contained flashes of the old Hemingway or used some such respectful variation, but it did not set the world alight. In the New York Times, James Wood wrote that the book
contains all that is most easily imitated of Hemingway’s style, reminding us again that after about 1935 the author franchised himself in increasingly despairing outlets.He added that
The book’s failings are ones that have passed into contemporary currency in American writing. There is much sloshing male sentimentality, in that now characteristic form in which masculinity is taken to be inherently metaphysical (to hunt game is to quest, to be sexually needy is to confront ‘the loneliness’).Wood also noted that
Sentences are either casually functional or busily functional; in the latter category are many sentences that are completely uninteresting except that they carry on as if they were very interesting, as if they were little lozenges of lyricism when in fact they only leak informationOn the question of the quality of the — extensively edited — work published after Hemingway had died, biographer Michael Reynolds was unimpressed. Writing in the Winter 1991 edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) about For Whom The Bell Tolls 50 years on he noted that
About the posthumous works, critics are divided and scholars are largely silent. The Garden of Eden was so badly edited that the present text is like reading A Tale of Two Cities with London left out. A Moveable Feast, a curious kind of fiction, is only marginally better in its editing. Two chapters were cut, most of the others were re-sequenced, and his foreword was pieced together by his editors from several different manuscripts.Tom Jenks, who had finally knocked The Garden Of Eden into publishable shape, was equally unimpressed with Islands In The Stream: in the introduction to a volume of critical essays about the novel, he described it as
a not-quite-finished novel about World War II in Cuba, that began very well but tailed off to the level of a book for boys.Scribner’s were not a charity, but a commercial outfit, and they cannot be faulted for doing their best to edit the welter of words Hemingway had produced into what they hoped was a halfway decent ‘product’. But would it be unkind to inquire why ‘one of the world’s greatest writers’ who always insisted on how professional he was, both as an artist and as a journalist, was apparently unable to stick to his brief when writing non-fiction — his feature for Life magazine; why the writer whose style was once admired for its tough and brutal concision had become so unfeasibly prolix?
And why was ‘one of the world’s greatest writers’ unable to produce manuscripts in good enough shape to forgo considerable editing? After he published For Whom The Bell Tolls, he always fretted that he might never repeat its success: did he suspect that the work he sat on was not quite up to snuff? Any answer would merely be idle speculation; but it is all a little odd.
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